NO Return Address
by Threepwillow
Summary: When Haruko first found Naota, she kept calling him Taro. But there's a real Taro, with a real life, real friends, and real issues when it comes to guitar swinging aliens. MxF, FxF and bizarre EVERYTHING.
1. Chapter 1

The scene opens. There's a back alley in clear aerial view, standing in which are five people who look to be teenagers. Like most alleyway congregations such as this, one of them is smoking pot.

It isn't me, though.

Exhibit A: Yamamaru Koutaro. From the aerial view, I'm the blond. I won't lie to you and say it's natural – I got talked into doing it and it's been that way since last month. I'm the one leaning against the half-filled Dumpster that for some reason is painted magenta. With blue spray paint, someone splayed graffiti on the side in English. None of us can read it.

I get punched in the arm. "Right, Taro-kun? Riiiight?" Exhibit B, the other aerial-view-blond, has apparently told a joke I should be laughing at. I chuckle half-heartedly despite the fact that laughing hurts. It still doesn't hurt as much as getting punched in the arm by Reiko, so I play along. Reiko's sitting on an upturned metal trash bin next to me, crossing her legs with their gigantic red-striped socks. She's not the one with the pot, either – her ganguro-lips are too busy smacking on horrendously cherry bubble gum.

"I don't get it," says Exhibit C with his pot. Chisune was my best friend until about six months ago when the drugs started getting worse. I don't know where he is eighty percent of the time now. Aerial view: blue stocking cap. Seating place: standing, lounging, call it what you will but his back's against the brick wall of his father's autoshop next door. He's smiling stupidly and I can see the hole where I knocked out one of his bottom teeth when we were twelve.

Exhibit D isn't really speaking. You can see her best from the aerial view because she's lying on her back on the Dumpster with me. But her hair is black tinged with purple and her skirt is too short and I'm in love with her and her name is Mika. She's playing with the tab off her fourth can of this new sweet-but-sour soda that apparently everyone in France is drinking. She hated Reiko's joke and so she throws it at her. "You're such a douche, Rei. Remind me why we speak to you?"

"Because I'm screwing your sister," Reiko responds with too much volume and too much laugh, and we'd all laugh too, even me, if it weren't true. Exhibit E sits on the fire escape above us and dangles her stocking feet down because Reiko took off her red vinyl boots. Come to think of it, you probably can't see her from the aerial view. Her hair is false-auburn and ultra-short if it matters. She chews on a red whip of licorice that's almost too short to be useful any more. They're both beautiful, but Suzume looks nothing like her sister. Maybe Mika is adopted.

"Anyway, tramp, you're not fucking supposed to make Taro laugh because his head's getting worse. Yeah?"

I get over the fact that Mika's officially said my name exactly five hundred times more quickly than I expect and answer with almost no awkward delay. "Since my half-birthday," I agree. "I just realized that's what it was on the day it happened. It was my half-birthday."

"Oh no, Taro-kun's half-birthday. We're so close to the end of summer. It _bites_."

Suzume ignores Reiko's whining. "Significance? To school or your half-day?" I shrug in response and realize that Reiko will have left a bruise. I bruise so easily.

"You should take something, for that." Chisune points at my head, and I think he meant to indicate the center of my forehead but his finger's level with my left eye. Reiko offers me her potato chips and I eat more than I think she wanted me to. "You'd be surprised how much it helps."

"I don't want your fucking drugs," I insist, but I'm starting to disbelieve myself.

"No, you just want _all _my fucking chips," retorts Reiko. And I laugh. And it _hurts_.

"Knock it off, bitch!" Mika barks.

"Don't talk to my girlfriend like that!" says Suzume.

"Some sister you are."

I swing my legs and kick the Dumpster. Some of the paint flakes off, and some of it is where the English writing is.

I guess we'll never know what it said now.

---

Fall means school and school means work and work should mean money but it's school and we're not getting paid to flunk pre-calc. I've hated math for as long as I can remember and senior year has yet to change my opinion. I am nearly asleep in class instead and would probably be snoring if my head didn't fucking _hurt _so bad.

I am awakened from my almost-unconsciousness by a ball of paper chucked at my skull. I sit up slowly to see my incompetent teacher sipping coffee at her desk (she thinks we do these assignments) and the crumpled paper by my foot. One edge is torn from the bottom side to the third note ring hole. It's code. It's a note from Chisune.

Unfolded, I am glad the note is in red ink or the crinkles would obscure his tiny handwriting. _Look at that cold-sun,_ the note says. _We are running today. It is a running day. The field, it calls, and it says to us 'Taro and Cheeze, today is a running day.'_

I laugh despite myself and my whopping headache. It's been so long since Chisune and I have run together. And he isn't lying – the sun is bright in the blue-white sky and we'd be warm enough while still being cold enough. I tell him yes with my eyes and he smiles from behind long bangs that also conceal headphones. The smile reminds me of the cold-sun day and I am glad to see it again, too.

It's last period. We might as well leave now. He yanks his blue cap on and I subtly slip my bag over one shoulder. Half the class is gone already anyway. I'm out the door seconds before he is and we roam the halls and jump the fence and at last, there is the track and there is the unkempt field beyond it.

"You heard the field calling us all the way in Ishikawa-san's room," I say and it is only half-question.

"Through my headphones and everything," Chisune replies with a bit of a grin – no smile, just teeth. He's already wearing nothing but pants and I move to do the same. "You are hard of hearing. It was plain as day."

"A day with fog, maybe." He shoves me, and I'd have fallen to the ground were I not already there stretching out.

"I'll give you a break, you were asleep." We've both stretched, we're up, we're walking to the old tree stump that marks the start of our makeshift course.

"Easy today?" he wonders but I'm already speaking my answer.

"Hard. The cherry tree route."

"I'm out of practice," he reminds me as if I need reminding. "Lungs are weak, and all that."

"Whose fault is that?" I manage to say before I can no longer contain myself and my feet move forward with their own minds.

Oh yes, oh God, yes, _running_.

When I'm running I'm not Koutaro. I'm not Taro-kun or Yamamaru-san or "that crazy blond kid". I'm a separate entity. When I'm running I don't talk or see or hear or breathe, I just _feel_. When I'm running I'm not seventeen without a goal and I'm not flunking pre-calc. When I'm running I don't think about my dad that I've never seen or my friends that I see way too much.

When I'm running, my head _doesn't fucking hurt._

I'm moving faster than I think I've ever moved now. I feel like that a lot when I run but this time I think it's true. No human being moves as fast as this. I am a machine, a god, the _king _of gods, the pirate king –

I don't know what that means but I am unconscious before I have time to consider it.

---

I wake up staring at metal rafters and a ceiling fan and it takes me a few moments to realize l am in Keiji-san's shop. I roll over, confused, and nearly fall off the bench he and Chisune have slung me over.

"You okay?" Chisune asks me from a chair in an opposite corner.

"Do I fucking look okay?" I snap, harsher than I intend. "I got _hit._"

He looks at me like I'm retarded. "You tripped, Taro. There was a scuff in the dirt next to a rock and everything."

"The hell?" I argue. "Cheeze, I fucking got _hit_! In the back of the head. With something hard, too, felt like pretty solid plastic."

"I didn't hit you," he defends automatically. "And no one else was out there. I'd have seen them."

"I was in the cherry trees. You could have missed them…whoever it was."

"Taro-baka, you were running so fast that you were already fucking _past _the cherry trees. You were way off into the field."

"The hell?" I repeat. "That's not physically possible."

"Look, can you just shut the hell up?" he bites, and now I know I've gotten him just as angry as me. "You're lucky my cell was charged, or you'd still be laying there like a dead guy! You tripped over your own goddamn big feet and my dad left a paying customer to come rescue your sorry ass."

I am silent. I'm back to staring at the ceiling now, one hand absently fingering the small bit of bandaging on my head. The ceiling has never smiled at me before and so I can't hate it for not smiling now. "Who told you to do that, anyway."

"Some punk named Taro-kun."

"Taro-kuuuuun?" a female voice suddenly drawls from the next room. A helmeted head swings into view in an oversized doorway, all manic grins and golden eyes.

I realize then that my head hasn't hurt since I awoke, because seeing her face is what tears my brain to pieces.


	2. Chapter 2

The crazy woman seems to feel that she can sit and have an almost normal conversation with Chisune while my skull is exploding. Both of them are ignoring me but for obviously different reasons. I just don't know what hers is yet.

"Ahh, Taro-kun. He's just the guy I was looking for."

"You were looking for Taro?"

"Yeah, about six weeks ago." She rubs a finger in her eye and scrapes out something appallingly puce and crusty. Her next sentence is directed toward it, still sitting on the tip of her gloved index finger, and not Chisune at all. "Ended up in _Mabase_, of all places. Who's ever heard of Mabase anyway?"

"My dad has a cousin in Mabase."

"Huh. Reeeeally. Small world." She's done staring at the eye scum and she flicks it at me but misses. "Small world with _small _minds." She bends over – _she's fucking tall_, I realize – and stares me in the eye. "And this one's getting smaller every day!"

Without any semblance of warning, she reaches out and grabs the free end of my head bandaging and yanks it loose with a fierce tug that sends me spinning. I almost get knocked into Chisune twice before she is done with her completely random action. Her hand grazes my cheek more than once and each time is like a blow to the head with a cinderblock.

Once the bandage is gone I scream.

_Something is growing out of my head._

The crazy woman sees it too and laughs maniacally. "I'm not too late! This is perfect!"

My eyes dart toward Chisune in their desperate hunt for an explanation. "I'm sorry," he practically pleads, "I'm sorry but we thought it was just the lump, the lump from when you fell and hit your head on the rock but then it _moved_ – "

"Who is this woman?!" I am screaming but her hand is wrapped around the _thing _on my head and she's tugging as hard as she can.

"Why – " she grunts with the strain of the effort evident in her voice – "won't – " and now her elbow's crunching into my ear in a way that I'm certain ears shouldn't be forced to endure – "you – " she tries pushing at it from underneath but this is obviously not the way to go about it – "just – " it is _not _humanly possible for someone to brace their legs against someone else like this – "let – " _my head is going to fucking spontaneously combust _– "GO?"

But she's lost the tug-of-war with the monster inside my head and with that flash of green light that always seems to accompany the paranormal in the movies, she is pulled inside.

I shouldn't know who Atomsk is, I tell myself.

I shouldn't be thinking that Chisune is like déjà vu of a kid in a city I've never _been _to.

I shouldn't be inherently scared to death of this thing that really only looks like a company logo, two capital _M_s sort of superimposed on each other. I shouldn't have all the chords to twenty different bass guitar songs memorized _left-handed. _I shouldn't get the feeling that I need to remember what my name should be, and not what my name is. I shouldn't think that vodka tastes better on planets that aren't Earth.

I shouldn't want to ride on a yellow vespa instead of running, because that _doesn't make a shit's worth of sense._

"It doesn't make a shit's worth of sense," her voice was saying the next time I had any of my five senses other than tasting metal. I realized the other three were working as well, just that being the idiot I am I hadn't opened my eyes yet.

"There's no way in Uranus I could've gotten sucked back in," she's continuing. "N.O's a one-way ticket. The imbecilic things come out and they can't go back again."

I think that's the point where she figures out I'm staring at her and decides that she needs to stare back in reciprocation. So…we stare.

"You're an alien," I tell her as if she doesn't know it already.

"You've never met your father," she answers in the same exact tone of voice, only female.

"Your name is Haruha Raharu," I say like I'm repeating the first thing I said.

"You wanna screw a girl named Morita Mika," but this time her voice is sly and condescending and I hate her for saying it in front of Chisune.

Except he fainted and I think his father is calling the cops.

---

I have gone straight past the point of being confused and decided that angry is a much better route.

I am angry that this crazed woman, Haruko or Raharu or whoever she's telling people she is, has landed in my life for no apparent reason. I'm angry to learn that it's her fault, however indirectly, that my head hurts so much. I'm angry that she grabbed my wrist and yanked me onto her vespa and sped away so fast that jumping off and escaping was never even an option. I'm angry that she had the nerve to kick the unconscious body of my friend before we left.

The vespa's brakes screech horridly to a stop in the middle of the field that I recognize as my false-track. The sun has almost completely set and soon I won't even be able to see her at all. Right now she's a silhouette against the gray-gold sky. She kicks me off the yellow moped and into the dirt before I realize that I could have run away.

She knows I can run. I hate her for being right in knowing that even running away and never stopping wouldn't fix this. So I drag myself to my feet and stare at her, her eyes the same color as the sunlight that's going down the drain.

"Are you dropping me back at the scene of the crime?"

"No…no that's not it. See, Taro-kuuuuun, you know too much."

"Whose fault is that for jumping inside my fucking head?"

"C'maaahn, you know why that happened."

I don't answer, but only because I _do _know.

"Well, it's 'bout that time." She hefts her guitar from the sling on her back and readies it like a baseball bat.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She gives me a funny look and her grip on the guitar neck relaxes about two inches. "Surely you can't be that stupid. Please tell me you're not. Isn't it obvious? I'm gonna have to kill you. Now be a good boy and hold still." She grips the guitar harder again but I've already started yelling.

"Kill me? For something I didn't do? Whose bright idea was it to send you after me? My N.O is closing up because I'm about to turn eighteen, so that automatically means you have to milk me dry at the last possible second? Yeah, _that _plan worked!"

"Don't you _dare _insinuate that I am not a trained professional, human fungus!"

"Trained professional my ass! Is that why Medical Mechanicca wants you?"

"You're getting yourself involved in things that are none of your beeswax! You're only ensuring that your death be slower and more painful!"

"Why's it gotta be my head, huh? Why can't you use your precious Takkun back in Mabase? Is it because you love him too much to exploit his head?"

I strike a nerve and now she's yelling louder than me.

"You know NOTHING of my relationship with that boy!"

"I know everything! You were in my head!"

"YOUR DEATH IS NOW!"

But instead of a loud thump of plastic connecting with bone and a twang of guitar strings I hear a strange whizzing noise and the jingle of a bicycle bell. I dive out of the way as fast as I can but Raharu hits the dirt like a felled tree.

Propped up on my elbows, I look up at my mystery rescuer and realize, realize with my heart about to join my head in rupturing that it is Mika.

I expect a great statement of heroism, and I know she wishes she could do the same, but both of us are to be disappointed as all she croaks out is, "I…have never ridden…a bike _so fucking fast_…in my life." And I can tell that she's about to pass out but that's not very reassuring to me and so she's smiling instead to disguise it.

As Raharu is attempting to stand again, groaning as she has no right to do without her head pounding like mine, thudding sneakers approach from the same direction as Mika's bike. I recognize the thud immediately as Chisune and wonder who woke him up. He approaches us from through the cherry trees and positions himself behind the alien so we've got her surrounded.

"How'd you find – " I start, but he's answering already.

"She's leaking fluid," he says, "s'why she came in in the first place. Leaves a trail."

"Oh I see, I see, I neglected to cover the evidence." Raharu is standing and I swear I can see a bicycle tire tread imprinted in her face even in the almost-pitch-dark. "The monkeys score on a technicality, eh."

And that's when I realize that it's never this dark this early at this point in the year and the thunder sounds.

"But the game is called on account of rain."

And I hate her for knowing that we don't have enough energy left in us to chase her more today.

"We'd lose her anyway," Chisune says in an effort to excuse our lack of pursuit. "The rain'd wash away the trail, and none of us even have a light. We'd be totally blind."

"Yeah," I say, "fucking blind."

"He's the only mechanic in town, she can't stay away from your place forever," Mika adds.

"Yeah," Chisune says, "she'll never make it anywhere else."

"I can't move too well," I tell them, "my head and all. One of you have a cell phone?"

"Yeah," Mika says, "you can come home with me."

The best and worst things to ever happen to me should not come to pass on the same day.


	3. Chapter 3

I'd forgotten that Suzume had a car, but it's red and it's old and junky and I didn't really think it would carry all four of us back to their house.

Chisune had gone home soon after Raharu vanished, claiming a broken curfew and an already suspicious father. Mika had called her place but gotten only Suzume – and, it had turned out, Reiko.

"Get in!" the three of them chime at once, and who am I to refuse?

Reiko has obviously called shotgun which delegates Mika and I to the back. She worms in behind her sister and Reiko helps me into the other back seat before climbing in herself. She almost hits my head on the doorframe and I contemplate murder. Mika lets me lie down across the back but puts my feet at her end.

"So what the fuck is going on?" Suzume demands, loud and abrasive against the quiet night.

"Don't you have any consideration? He's got a damn _alien _chasing him down and bashing his head in!" Mika looks at me with eyes that are sorry and skeptical and sexy. I want to look back at her with a face full of _everything will be all right _but my expression is stuck in permanent pain and what-the-hell. She turns back to the front seat. "And don't you even _think _about turning on the radio!"

"You can't tell me what to do!"

"I can so, bitch, he's bleeding from the head!"

"Not on my carseat!"

"This car's a piece of shit!"

But Reiko's ears had perked almost as soon as Mika had spoken. "Alien?" she repeats slowly, and an exchanged glance between me and Mika means _we have made a mistake._

"Some chick calling herself an alien, anyway. Personally, my money's on a complete mental case." Mika makes a face as if finally losing an internal struggle and wraps her expensive-looking blue jacket around the wounds that have reopened on my head. She cringes a little when she reaches my forehead and _oh god oh god that lump must be there again and there is no _way _that is attractive._ "She hit Taro with a guitar earlier, Cheeze says, and was about to do it again when we saved his ass." But the next look she gives me is _tell me everything later._ I nod my head against her jacket and am relieved to feel only about ninety-five percent as much pain as before.

By now we're out of the field and back on the main road, driving away from the school in a direction I never go but which is obviously the way to their house. I can almost see objects passing by in silhouette out the window behind Mika's head. Suzume in the driver's seat is forcibly silent and I know Reiko is lost in quiet contemplation. _She doesn't have her purse, _I realize, _or that book'd be out. _Better than some kind of radar, I guess.

"What'd she look like?" Suzume asks finally, clearly fed up with the silence.

"Tall," I manage, "bleach-pink hair, eyes were this funny gold color…Tall more than anything though, she had to bend to meet my eye level."

"Damn," Reiko mutters, but anything else she's going to say is cut off as Suzume makes a sharp right into what must be their driveway and we all shift awkwardly from the centrifugal force. It sends my head into this place where it's reeling and pounding at once and yet again I almost cry out in pain. But that would be such a pussy thing to do.

We pull up and the car stops and Suzume and Reiko get out. With the three of them tugging and shoving I emerge from the rear seat, dizzy and heavy and barely alive but alive nonetheless. Mika follows me out and insists on helping me inside, but Suzume does it anyway because Mika really is too small to support me. That close to Suzume I notice that they don't even smell the same.

We're through the front door and I'm really expecting to be unceremoniously deposited onto a futon or something but Mika manages to spur her sister onward until I make it up the stairs and to the guestroom. And past the guestroom. And onto Mika's bed.

I am blissfully confused until she rudely reminds Suzume that their uncle is coming to visit tomorrow. Reiko and Suzume retreat into their room and leave me and Mika alone.

I am almost glad to have bled so much from the head because I now have less blood that runs elsewhere unwonted. I'm staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars puttied up on Mika's ceiling and trying to purge my mind of impure thoughts as she drags a bedcot out of her humongous closet. Then, of course, I'm staring sideways into her closet and trying to find the green shirt with the cherries on it because I can't remember the last time she wore it and I _fucking love that shirt. _I get all of three seconds' search time before the door clicks closed a little too hard and she plops the cot onto a floor so clean that she didn't have to clear a space.

I'm so incognizant. "You never wear the cherry shirt."

"It got too small, I'm…older, now." She says it without even pausing to process my totally random statement. Why is this girl perfect.

"You mean too small in the chest, then," I reply, so casual, so unaware of the words that are actually leaving my mouth. "It's okay, it looks really good like that."

'You've developed this terrible habit," she informs me, "of staring at my boobs."

And of course I have, because she's always right because she's Mika, and so I slowly draw my gaze away from where her arms are folded across her chest to her face, staring down at me from where she's standing over me and making me feel even more nonexistent, even less coherent.

"I'm giving you the bed, to prevent damage to your head, and taking this shitty cot myself."

This instantly flips my chivalry switch. "I can't let you do that. You'll be miserable."

"I can't let you die on my watch." A pause. "Or in my bed. That would look bad."

I manage a half-assed smile. "I'd die happy."

"My dyke sister has guy pajamas if you want them."

"Or we could share the bed."

"Prop yourself up so the fluid doesn't collect in your skull or something."

"Your bed smells so nice."

"You've evidently been addled in the brain. Stop speaking."

And I follow every last one of her orders, because I can't refuse because she's _Mika._

---

In my dreams I am six feet tall.

This is the first thing I notice. I _know _I am six feet tall in my dream – in real life I just look it, I am five-eleven and constantly being ragged on for being taller than all my friends but I still know that I'm not six feet tall. Except in my dream I know that I _am._

The next thing I notice is that I'm standing on the top beams of a suspension bridge. I lurch as my fear of heights kicks in but then I realize I don't _have _a fear of heights. So I look down, expecting to see something even more surreal and getting a pretty big surprise when everything seems completely normal.

Below, by the bridge, sits a girl almost my age and a boy a good bit younger. She looks like what Reiko would be if she weren't a ganguro – still the same big lips, school skirt too short and rounder, softer in a way that doesn't make her fat, just curvy. The boy looks exactly like Chisune did the day before I broke his tooth.

And then it hits me – despite all logic and the fact that I _shouldn't_, I know who these kids are.

Samejima Mamimi holds a cigarette between her lips, not unlike Reiko's recurring lollipop from a few months back before she discovered bubble gum. She blows smoke in Takkun-Naota-Atomsk's face and he coughs way too much for someone who spends time around a smoker a lot. She giggles. He scowls. The wind blows and I'd laugh at the way he struggles to keep his hat on but the bridge is swaying and I just know I'm going to fall off.

Except I don't.

I hear them as well as I see them, and that hits me as way too well considering I'm stories above their heads.

"Didja hear?"

"About the baseball game? Yeah, we lost by a lot. I don't get why you keep going to those things, Haruko always beats us."

"Canti's going to beat her one of these days. He's a god, he's just letting her win until he gets sick of playing fair." She inhales with a drag that should leave any normal human coughing like the dying. "But not that. She didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"Some boy broke Haru-san's brain."

"It sure as hell wasn't me."

"No," she says, "I think it was him."

She turns skyward and jabs her index finger at the boy she shouldn't be able to see that is me. Looking down at her, down her finger, I almost feel like laughing. Who the hell is this girl?

Then I burst into flame.

I want to escape it, to fucking _run from it because running is what I do, _but I'm on top of this bridge and I can't.


	4. Chapter 4

No one can sleep when they're being lit on fire so now I'm awake. I wake up to excuses: I never sleep well in beds that aren't mine. I've had a trying day. My head's still addled. I could be hallucinating. I went to bed a little earlier than I usually do and I was asleep all day.

But a scrap of my conscience that sounds unnervingly like Reiko says, "Something paranormal is going on."

I roll over and groan in pain and confusion. The sunlight filtering through Mika's Venetian blinds and peach curtains is new and gray and I can tell I'm the only person awake inside the house. I shift back around a little and see Mika on the cot beside and below me with a blue afghan clutched half to her chest. Her bare legs peek out from the bottom and I stifle another groan and wonder how cold her shower gets.

_Or you could go running_, the Chisune-conscience reminds me.

I didn't know I could be this quiet but I guess it's Mika's carpeted floor compared to the creaking hardwood I'm used to. Her door also opens noiselessly and I locate my sneakers by her front door before venturing out into the dawn gray.

It's cold, but there's no one around.

My feet pound subconsciously at the gravel of her driveway, the grass of her front lawn, the weeds of her back lawn. I think I've circled her house three times clockwise when my head starts pounding harder than my feet and I sink down hard onto (unfortunately) the gravel.

Have I been destroyed? Is this the end of Taro, when he can't even run without malfunctioning in the head and falling and scraping his knees into oblivion? As I reach up to clutch my head in pain and defeat, is that my brain I can feel leaking out of my ear?

"Nice shot," someone mutters to herself from the roof of Mika's house.

As much as it pains me to further incline my head I look up to the jerkily brightening sky and see a silhouette of someone short and soft and blonde against the stupid winter white-sun. When the leaking brains I pull from the hair by my temple turns out to be a blue-gray wad of bubble gum then I know it must be Reiko. She's up strangely early and my curiosity gets the better of my better judgment. I scale the porch railing and hop from there to the roof next to a window that I assume belongs to Suzume's room. That's where Reiko's sitting.

I hand her the gum. She looks at me like I'm stupid and then gives up and begins chewing it again. It's not like it really hit the ground.

We sit in silence for a few moments before she works up the stamina to ask me the question that I know she's been dying to ask me all night and which is even probably the reason she's already awake. "So. Aliens?"

"She was inside my head. I think it's safe to assume that the memories I got from her were definitely those of an alien. She said so herself to Chisune's cousin."

"Cheeze's cousin? What the fuck?"

"I dunno, man. I guess it's his second cousin. It's this stupid kid named Naota who lives in Mabase – where the _fuck _is Mabase – and thinks it's cool to put the moves on his brother's girlfriend, who's this chick that looks kind of like you only not ganguro, and there's a TV-head robot that's really some intergalactic pirate king, only I think that's really the kid, and she was in love with him – the alien chick, not the brother's girlfriend – "

"Slow down, for fuck's sake! It's only eight in the morning."

I turn away from the place I hadn't realized I'd been staring, a spot on the gravel, the spot that must be the spot where I fell, and look at her. "Did you really hit me with that gum from all the way up here?"

"Good aim, yeah?"

"That's not human. Maybe you're the alien."

But she's halfway through Suzume's window with her ass sticking in the air and I seriously keep thinking she's going to fall off the damn roof before she re-emerges and hands me a bright pink notebook.

"Write it down. Everything. We'll get to the bottom of this."

I open the notebook and the first page says "Sai Reiko's Paranormal Investigations." It's in green ink with this funny sheen to it.

"It glows in the dark," she says.

---

There are pages and pages of this crap to the point where I can't even read it. Tucked into a flap in the back are printouts or photocopies or pencil drawings of crop circles and unidentified flying crap. I don't read it all – I can't read it all. Some of it seems to be in code and I assume it's "in case anyone finds it: top secret!" kind of stuff.

I've made it down into the living room by now. Everyone else is up for some reason. Reiko is trying and failing to help Mrs. Morita make something that we can call breakfast. Mrs. Morita seems vaguely concerned about my bandage but more concerned about her kitchen. I assure her that my stomach hurts more than my head and that she should get to worrying about the food. Mika darts through the kitchen door for reinforcement.

Suzume and I sit on opposite ends of the living room in identical chairs. I've got Reiko's notebook propped open on my lap and a blue inkball pen. I smear the ink writing.

_There was an alien inside my head, _I write. _But she got yanked in trying to pull something else out. I have something called an N.O unit. It acts as a portal to another dimension, or maybe lots of them. It's going to go away once I turn eighteen. That's why my head started hurting on my half-birthday. Cheeze's second cousin Naota has one too but the alien was in love with him. She found him looking for me. His worked better than mine does, but she couldn't use him because she loved him. A robot came out though. He was called Canti, but I don't think that was his real name, it was just what Naota's friend called him. She started fires, and her name was Mamimi. He was a robot, and he was blue but then he turned red. I think this meant that he was getting more powerful. He had to merge with Naota to do it. He did this by eating him, only it wasn't really eating him._

_Maybe it has to do with the Pirate King. I don't know what that is but I know that Raharu was in love with him, so maybe it was him and not the kid. But I don't know if the Pirate King was the robot or Naota. I only got her memories and they seemed to run together pretty bad._

_She wants to kill me. She rides a yellow moped. She has a Rickenbacker guitar that she plays left-handed. Her eyes are yellow too. They're weird. She'd be kind of pretty if she weren't insane. She's taller than_

Suzume's reading over my shoulder.

"Don't encourage her."

"Breakfast is ready!"

---

Mika sits across from me at breakfast. I have to remember I have more than one problem right now. She's not eating suggestively but it still seems that way to me anyway. I try to stare at my food instead of her tongue but it doesn't work very well. "How's your head?" she says.

Right. My head. The one on top of my neck, that got hit by the guitar. "It's better. Probably not concussed."

"We should go to Keiji-san's shop later, all of us. We can talk to Chisune and maybe between the five of us we'll figure something out." It's bold of her to talk about it in front of her mother. I stuff my face a bit more to keep from answering immediately.

"We have a lot of things to take into consideration," I say at last. "I wrote them all in Reiko's book."

Suzume snorts into her juice. Reiko spits into it. They glare.

"Is it safe for you to go out there?" Reiko asks me. Mrs. Morita reacts this time. It's an incredulous look which wasn't what I was expecting. Maybe she's used to paranormal-paranoia Reiko.

"We need to go see Cheeze, I think. She's been into their place, maybe she left something."

"Something I can analyze!"

"Don't get too excited."

"Whatever. I'm going to get dressed. Excuse me, Okaa-san." She leaves before she's really gotten permission and the rest of us keep eating. And then one by one the women start excusing themselves and here I am alone with an empty plate and a head full of strange thoughts.

Some of which still aren't mine.

_She's taller than me, but only by a little bit, but still. _

_There's also a guy with really thick eyebrows but they might be fake or something. I think they may have had some kind of relationship. He might be someone we can trust but he might not. But I think we should try to talk to him._

_She was only in my head for a few minutes so I didn't get everything. But maybe it's safe to say that she got as much from me as I did from her. She probably knows where I live_

Suzume, Reiko, and Mika come down the stairs all at once. Reiko's laughing at some joke she apparently just cracked but she's the only one. Her arm's around Suzume's waist but Suzume doesn't seem all too welcoming.

Mika's not paying attention to either of them. Mika's smarter than that. Mika's wearing the cherry shirt.


	5. Chapter 5

Suzume's driving doesn't seem nearly as reckless without the strobing neon flashing past the windows at what my injured head interpreted as breakneck speed. Sitting upright is better. I don't get lost. I know we're going to Chisune's place.

Of course he's got a huge garage so Suzume has a place to park. I'm the last one out of the car because I think Chisune is still mad at me.

He's not.

"Oh for fuck's sake, you're _alive_," he grunts, and in some parallel dimension where that was the kind of thing we did he would have hugged me. As it is, I see it in his eyes.

"Has she been back?" Reiko asks without even trying to mask the eagerness.

"We haven't been that unlucky," he answers. "Have fun staring at the motor oil and blood that they left on the floor."

The mention of my own blood pulses through my brain with a dull spike like landing on your ankle funny.

This is my crack team, I realize suddenly. These are the people that are going to keep me alive until I turn eighteen. A pair of lesbians, one crouched on the floor and staring at a mix of plasma and Pennzoil with her ass in the air like she thinks we can't see her underwear. It's magenta. The other leaning against the wall and staring at the first like she thinks we can't see her jealousy. It's green. A socializing half-bitch I've liked since I knew her. A struggling half-junkie I've known since I liked him.

And me.

Something tells me we're really going to need some more help if I have to live like this for another six months.

"When's the next train," I say, trying not to mumble, "to Mabase?"

---

We can buy two round-trip tickets between us. It's further away than we thought originally because Raharu-whoever made it so quickly on a vespa. That, and we bought fast food.

"I can ask Kaa-san for money, you know," Mika reminds us. Lips, teeth, straw. Milkshake. Cherries.

"Uncle," says Suzume.

"Fuck Uncle."

"Please don't," Reiko cautions.

Suzume throws a ketchup packet at her. "_Duh_."

"So who's going?" Chisune asks. "'Cause if it's not me, I expect to be paid back."

"Taro has to go, of course," Reiko states obviously around both gum and fries. Disgusting. "It's his head with the alien's memories in it. He knows who we're looking for."

"Do I?" I question, almost to myself.

Reiko answers. "Eyebrow! We've gotta find him, he clearly knows what's going on. Better to not involve anyone else you had a flash-sideways to."

"It'd be easier if we could stay with my family, though. In case."

"But then it would only made sense if you went. I don't think it's gonna work if Cheeze goes."

"You guys are missing school," Suzume deadpans. She finishes her chicken. I'm curious. She wants to go?

"You want to go?" Mika wonders. We think alike. I should tell her that sometime.

Oh fuck, what did I say to her last night?

"It'd just be most convenient." She also finishes her diet Sprite.

"We may also need an adult to go that far," I realize. No, no, that's wrong. I'm supposed to make Mika come with me. I try to focus on the pickles that fell out of my burger and not on my confusion.

"We should draw straws," Reiko insists. Naturally she wants to go.

Hearing her voice again brings me back to the last couple of things she said. "Wait," I realize. "Wait, hold on. I can't…" At least I don't think I can. I try, just as a test. "I can't get at everything she left in me at first. I'm forgetting." No more guitar solos, no more batting averages. "Bet she's forgetting too."

"That's good! That's our advantage, because you wrote everything in my book!" Reiko waves it around like it's some kind of western Bible. A Bible with a smear of mustard on the upper-right-hand corner. It's almost enough to make me laugh.

Except goddamnit, laughing hurts my head.

"Yeah," I agree at last. "Maybe you should – "

"_No_." I almost feel bad for Reiko that the other three answered so vehemently in unison. Almost.

"We should vote. It's easier. And whoever wins we'll take Reiko's book, regardless." They look at me like this is a respectable answer. Well, except Reiko, because she's not looking at me at all and is instead busying herself with cleaning up our McDonald's trash so that she doesn't have to look at me. Or Suzume.

"Suzume does seem like the most logical choice. I'm just jealous because she gets to miss out on one of Uncle's…_memorable_ visits." Mika wrenches her milkshake cup back out of Reiko's grasp because Reiko's trying to throw it away and she isn't done with it.

"Doesn't bother me."

"Well, I want to go." No pretenses, Sai Reiko.

"_No_." It's all four of us this time. I just can't help myself – I just can't bring myself to think that a three-hour train ride with Reiko wouldn't drive me insane. I don't know how Suzume does it.

Maybe that's why she wants to come.

Hope she knows what she's signed herself up for.

---

By Sunday all I can remember is what I already knew. What I already knew, and Samejima Mamimi. She's a character that doesn't leave your head easily. Her pattern of speech, her panties, her pyromania.

I fortunately had missed out on any weird dreams beyond the night at Mika's house. After that, all the dreams were about that night at Mika's house. The concussion did nothing to my libido. The rest of Saturday we made a game plan for a game we'd never played before. It wasn't bad for a first try. I memorized what I wrote in Reiko's notebook. By this time, Nandaba Naota would be in the seventh grade at the secondary school. His dad's shop was easily avoided as we had no fucking clue where it really was. I could see in his face that Chisune almost wanted me to contact them but he never asked.

Medical Mechanicca looks like a clothes-iron. A big fucking clothes-iron. Riding into Mabase on the train it would be hard to miss. Find that, and from there we could find Eyebrow-sama (I don't even remember who started calling him that) and his crew, talk, negotiate, leave. Be back in time for dinner. Mrs. Morita was making something with miso.

Suzume sits across from me with Utada Hikaru in her ears. We're both staring out the window although I think for different reasons. I can see it in her face that she hasn't had sex with Reiko in over a week. That's usually around the time that it becomes visible. It's mostly in her cheekbones and the way her hands sag loosely around the armrests of her seat. On a good day they're clenched with confidence.

It's hard for me to straddle the line between _do you want to talk about it _and _I've got bigger hurdles to jump_. Maybe it's because in the back of my mind I know what's going on with them. It's what's always going on with them.

I know she can't hear me so I ask, "Who started screaming first?"

"Me," she answers.

Of course. It's always Suzume.

She tugs away her headphones. "Why do I go back to that bitch."

"All her friends are your friends."

"She just gets so goddamn hung-up on things that only half-exist. I'm real. I'm here. I'm what she wants."

"That's a pretty cocky thing to say."

"It's a pretty _honest _thing to say!" she snaps and other passengers look at us. It's not too many other people this early on a Sunday but it's enough to quiet her down and I'm glad for that. "She _used _to scream at me for a good reason."

"Part of being with people is getting over their weird habits."

"What would you know about a lover's habits?"

_You've developed this terrible habit of staring at my boobs_.

"…You've got a point."

"Bet she'd fuck me if I got a crop circle tattooed on my – "

And that's when the conversation is forced to end and I plaster a magazine over my face.

Raharu-Haruko strides up the aisle of the train with swagger oozing all over the place in a way that neither of us can miss. And whether the sentence she whispers after "Where is that _brat_?" is _I know he's **near** _or _I know he's **here** _is naturally irrelevant.

With her headphones back on it looks like Suzume is mouthing the lyrics when she asks, "That's her, right?" With my hair falling into my face it looks like I'm flipping it back when I nod. I turn a page of my Jump and pretend like I care what Train Heartnet is doing. Damnit, I'm way too blond to be inconspicuous. What I'd really like to do is slam my head through the glass window of the train in an attempt to remove my _motherfuckingOW _brain.

Once she's past I can breathe again and the non-N.O simmers back down to a moderate migraine. She walked the other way and I can't see her any more but Suzume's following after her with her eyes.

Following after her a little too closely.

_Oh, **fuck**._


	6. Chapter 6

She makes it to the next car and I exhale a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

It hits Suzume right in the face. "Brush your fucking teeth."

"No time," I reply, like it's actually an option I'm considering. "We've got to get out of here without her noticing. How far until Mabase?"

"_We are about to pass over a river. Next stop, Mabase._"

That answers that.

Suzume and I both begin scrambling to replace the objects we'd taken from our bags. I have Reiko's book along with my Jump and a bottle of green tea and it just barely fits. I yank my hood up over my hair to try and earn a little anonymity but it's sweltering for September and I get this reeling flash of Naota across the back of my brain as soon as I do. I risk the blond and pray that no one cares.

We're pretty bad at being sneaky as we practically scramble to get off the fucking train when it stops. I still haven't seen Raharu again yet but I keep feeling it's only a matter of time. I feel so damn paranoid; I hope I look as composed as Suzume because she's doing an amazing job of _not_ freaking the fuck out. We dart away from the platform and attempt to lose ourselves in the crowd but I'm still really tall. And there isn't much of a crowd in this nowhere town.

"You think we lost her?" I mumble to Suzume as we press through a small herd of businessmen.

"You wanna turn around and look?" she shoots back, and we keep going and pretend to forget it happened.

Once we've crossed to the other side of the station and made it out without incident I pause and allow my heart to attempt to start beating normally. The panic has got my head pulsating in dull pain like I knew it would but it's really not worth fighting any more. To calm myself I think of Mika but that just tosses me into another sort of excitement. Fuck.

I guess I'm sort of staring at the ground – I might even admit to being hunched over and panting a little with my hands on my knees – because Suzume is the one that goes, "The _fuck_?" and points off into the distance.

Yep. There it is. A great big fucking clothes-iron.

"I guess we start walking."

---

The train ride wasn't exactly short and now it's starting to get dark. We're really close though.

"You didn't tell me she was pretty."

It's the first sentence either of us has said for about half an hour. "Was I supposed to?"

"I guess not."

"You're dating Reiko."

"Am I?"

"You're fucking her at least."

"…Am I?"

I stop right under a street lamp and look at her, which involves once again lifting my gaze from the street. "Don't you dare break up with her, Morita Suzume. That'll make the three of us have to choose sides, and I'm equally scared of both of you. Unless you both kill each other in the process – "

"That can be arranged."

" – I don't want to hear it. Look, my brain's about to explode, can we talk about this some other time?"

"You didn't tell me she was pretty."

"She's not." _Your sister is_. I keep walking and I go straight past her. She follows and she's muttering under her breath but I tune it out because honestly, I really fucking _don't _want to hear it.

"So what, do we just walk right in and ask to speak to…who was it again?" She looks at me, then back at the strange building at which we've arrived.

"I…don't…know."

"Excellent."

But apparently we've walked too far because an (unwisely) unanticipated alarm goes off and a bright red light is pointing straight at the two of us before we can blink. And by the time we've blinked and opened our eyes there are three women with large guns pointed at us who definitely weren't standing there before. My hands fly into the air instantly and Suzume follows suit less drastically.

The closest, the shortest, a redhead, flips the sunglasses off her face to make eye contact with me. "The fuck you think you're doing?" she asks around a mangled toothpick that dangles from one corner of her mouth.

"Don't shoot," I say, panicked.

Suzume manages to keep her head level. "Morita Suzume. And this is Yamamaru Taro. We need to speak to…to…I don't know his name."

"With the eyebrows," I add helpfully.

"And what the fuck makes you think Commander Amarao needs to speak with you?" Redhead snaps.

Somewhere in my pounding head I find a scrap of conscious thought. "Raharu. It's about Raharu."

A fourth woman in a similar uniform walks out from behind a small guard tower about fifty feet to our left. She's blonde and dark-skinned and her eyes are huge like she's staring at someone she thought was dead. I can't quite look her in the face.

"Atsuko," she says faintly, as if dreaming. "Give them to me. I'll handle it." Redhead-Atsuko looks really confused but still lets her two companions manhandle Suzume and me over to the blonde.

"Hope you know what the fuck you're doing, Kitsurubami," she says.

"I'm just doing my job," she answers.

---

Blindly we follow the woman called Kitsurubami through a maze of hallways I'll never remember my way out of. I've almost stopped shaking but Suzume at least is paying attention. When we come to a stop it's in the most inhospitable waiting room I've ever seen, and that's counting the one for Keiji-san's garage.

She's lost her crazed dreamy air by now, though, and she's all business as she sits us down on the vomit-yellow stiff-backed sofa and proceeds to all but shout at us. "Where have you seen Raharu? Why wasn't this reported sooner? Do you have any idea what you're dealing with? How much do you know? Who _are _you?"

I answer the last one first. "I'm Taro. I'm the one she was looking for when she found Nandaba Naota and decided to use his N.O instead. Do you have any Pepto? I think I'm going to puke."

"Bathroom? Over there." She puts a sympathetic hand over her mouth and uses the other to gesture toward a utilitarian-looking door on the far wall. I leave Suzume talking to the uniformed woman on the sofa and go empty my tea and potato chips into a toilet the smell of which almost makes me want to do it again.

I wipe my mouth with the back of the sleeve on my hoodie. I stare at myself in the mirror over the spartan sink. I look like shit but that's probably good because I feel like shit and I'd hate to deceive anyone with my appearance. My eyes are really red and my hair is matted together and growing back dark at the roots. I look like I've been run over by a train and while the general effect is pretty much similar it's not a look that's going to be winning me the heart of the younger Morita. Even if she were here.

My cell phone rings and it's Mika.

I snap it open as fast as I can and jerk it up to my face in a gesture that almost sends it plunging into my eye. "M…moshi moshi?"

"Taro," she says evenly. "How are things coming along?"

"Good and bad," I answer, stepping out of the bathroom and into the room with Suzume and Kitsurubami – they may want to hear this. "We ran into Raharu on the train on the way up, but she didn't seem to notice or recognize us. She hasn't really gotten a look at Suzume yet anyway." From the looks on Kitsurubami and Suzume's faces she'd gotten around to explaining this far.

"Ask about the place!" I hear Reiko yell in the background. "I want to know if they made it inside!"

"You heard her."

"We're here." I take a deep breath and shoot a look at the blonde officer that asks for permission to elaborate. She turns me down with a sharp headshake and a pursing of her lips. "I'm…not allowed to elaborate. We're speaking to someone now, though."

"Figure it the fuck out!" Reiko yells back, and I hear Chisune agreeing as well.

"Come home alive," Mika insists, "and safe, you and Nee-san." And then she hangs up.

Excuse me if I read more into that than I should.

"That was?" Kitsurubami asks.

"Friends," I answer with a small gulp and Suzume nods to back me up.

A short, round girl with black-blue hair and thick spectacles rushes in all of the sudden and sort of hovers at Kitsurubami's shoulder.

"Is it a six-two-five or a six-two-seven?" she asks.

"I'm not sure what it is yet, but it's neither of those," Kitsurubami answers and the glasses-girl looks really confused. "Have you ever been here when there's been an eight-three-eight?"

A gasp. "There's such a thing?"

"It's possible."

"Well, there's definitely a blue state."

Kitsurubami rolls her eyes. "_That_ much is clear. It might progress to purple sooner than you think, though, so be on your toes." The other girl nods her head and scuttles off but leaves the clipboard she was holding with Kitsurubami.

She glances over it as if reading notes and then makes unnerving eye contact with me. "The Commander will see you now."


	7. Chapter 7

So I'm sitting in this room.

My hoodie smells like vomit and my left heel is blistering from running in my not-running shoes and all of my hair is matted together with sweat.

I have no idea what's going on beyond that the lights are off save a spotlight pointing on me and the uncomfortably small chair I'm sitting in. It's too dark to tell how far away the walls are but the space kind of echoes every time I breathe heavy, so I'm guessing it's big.

I'm sitting alone in this great big fucking room and every part of me is miserable except –

"Your head should have stopped hurting, at least."

_My head is absolutely, perfectly fine._

He says it right as I realize it and it is the first thing he says to me, followed by "Your friend out there mentioned you'd been having some discomfort. You'll find that after our last incident with Raharu, this facility has been equipped with state of the art devices that nullify N.O activity up to a certain level. We aren't taking any more chances."

If I could talk I would say "_Yes sir_." He has a "yes sir" tone in his voice.

He takes a few steps closer and his echoing footfalls put him right at the edge of my lonely little light. It blasts the features of his face into this deformed sort of relief but there is no mistaking him. No mistaking those eyebrows.

"My name is Commander Amarao."

"I know," my dry bile-washed throat cracks out.

"Really?"

I nod.

"Perhaps you should tell me what all has happened."

And so in the darkness I tell. I try to begin at the beginning but it feels like I am perpetually having to back up and insert more pieces of things that I've left off, like how Reiko is a paranormaphile and how my mother is away on business so no I have _not _told her. He's not taking notes or anything and actually he barely seems like he's listening except for the gasps of recognition he gives me when I detail events my brain stole from Raharu's that he was present at.

"Do you know why," he asks when I am through, and I can already tell that I don't, "when foreign matter comes through the N.O, it assumes the form of the hand so commonly?"

And yes, my answer is no.

"The human hand," he continues with his eyes fixed on his own, "is one of the first distinct shapes a newborn child learns to recognize. His own hands, his mother's hands, the hands of his peers in the nursery or the doctors in the hospital. When an N.O-transported organism tries to assume a form that will be compatible and recognizable by the beings in this world, it is often unable to access data from our world for more than a few nanoseconds. In that time, the knowledge it can glean from the human brain is, on average, everything up to the recognition of that hand."

I don't know where he's going with this but I do know that it's enough to cause me to look down at my own hands, baffled, mystified.

"The hand is a tool, by function. Humans and apes with opposable thumbs, for example, are able to accomplish much more specific and delicate tasks than creatures with blunt claws or pads. The refinement of this, combined with the knowledge in a human brain, is what sets us, mankind, apart from more primitive creatures."

I'm still lost.

"The N.O units only occur in children – mostly boys – between the ages of nine and eighteen. On the child's eighteenth birthday, the N.O will shrink, rupture, and all but vanish. In adults, it is still accessible, when manipulated by the right elements, but the output level is far from satisfactory. It can also be closed before the age of eighteen by an outside source, but the process is very painful." This last part is tacked on, I am sure, by the sudden shocked expression on my face. "You don't have too long to go, so it's not worth it.

"Tell me, Taro, do you ever stick your hand into a box, or a jar, or a dark corner, if you don't know what might be in there?"

"…Usually not, sir," I reply honestly.

"So why do you think, then, that N.O units in our world nearly always bring things _in_, instead of letting things _out_?"

I have to think and thinking is very difficult because my head is reeling and then rejoicing because reeling doesn't make it hurt. Reel, rejoice, _think_, Taro. "Because…on the other side…they can see in, to what's here, for that brief second. But on this side…it's just some guy's head…and they can't – can't look back." It makes more sense to me the more words I squeeze out.

"You're a very smart kid, Taro. Would you like an antacid?" He holds them out to me and drops them into my hands – three of them – like sugar cubes into a teacup. Deliberately. Stares me in the eye.

"You're also a very _unique _kid, Taro. See, there have only been four documented cases of reverse N.O action – sucking instead of blowing, if you will – worldwide, since the nineteenth century, back when they had no idea what the hell it was and called them demons and dream-creatures. It's a shame you're about to close, because you could have been much more beneficial."

With that, he takes my outstretched hands that I was staring at and that still have the antacids in them and slaps on a pair of thick metal-black handcuffs with a cold echoing _snick_.

"Taro, kid, I'm afraid you're going to have to stay here for awhile."

He claps me on the shoulder like I'm the son he never had and his hand shocks me and knocks me out.

---

"You get one courtesy call, sonny." It's the blue-haired woman who was speaking to Kitsurubami before.

Yes, one courtesy call, because they've stripped me of my clothing and taken away my cell phone and cleaned me up, thank god, but thrown me in a smallish white room with no windows and nothing but the giant logo of a seven-pointed star plastered on each of the four walls for decoration.

Or furniture.

She slides the phone on its tray through the flap in my door that is just for that purpose, to pass me food and a pan to piss in I suppose. My hands are still cuffed together and I can barely wield the receiver.

"Moshi moshi?"

"Mika," I breathe-pant-gasp. "They've locked me up, Mika. I don't know what to do. I'm cuffed – stuck in this gray jumpsuit – my head doesn't hurt though – I just – "

"Shut up, Taro. We're coming. I need to figure out how to borrow money from my mom. Where's Suzume?"

I gasp in realization. "I don't know. I don't think they'd have let her get away after making it so far, though, so she's got to be somewhere around here. Maybe she escaped! Oh, fuck it _all…_"

"Shut _up_, Taro. Just please, whatever the fuck you do, do not die. I reserve the right to kill you myself for making me ride the coach train."

"That's fair."

The other end of the line clicks and I don't know what to do other than put the receiver back and nudge the tray out with my toe and lean against the wall and cry. I get some strange relief out of knowing that I didn't de-man myself on the phone with Mika though.

---

Twenty minutes later Amarao stops by to pass me a write-up of the exact reason for locking me up.

_Koutaro:_

_The reversed state of your N.O makes you invaluable to our continued research. I regret the need to detain you but I was almost completely certain that you would not comply willingly with our demands. Keep in mind that we will only need you until your N.O unit ruptures, and then you will be free to go. I am aware that this will be a period of nearly five months, but surely you understand that in the face of scientific improvement and the protection of our planet and society such sacrifices must be made._

_The development I am referring to is, of course, a possible "round-trip ticket" for the N.O-released terrors that might invade our world. According to our surveillance on the Medical Mechanicca mainframe computer network, there are currently 731 N.O units in their "unlocked" state in existence in the eastern hemisphere, and a good four thousand more children who possess dormant N.O units. Medical Mechanicca is struggling to reduce the violence these organisms and their subsequent extermination create, so rather than destroying them entirely, our facility is seeking to use your N.O – and the technology we may hypothetically create based on similar principles – to return these organisms back to their natural habitats._

_The rations we feed you will from here on out be supplemented by tablets of rickenbackium, the compound that unlocks and wedges open N.O units for their usage. As N.O activity within this facility has been contained, nothing should "come out." You will be fine._

_You're their ticket home, Taro. Good luck._

I only need to read it once. I am frozen in this white room with my head full of swirling italicized words that basically tell me I am a slave. My tears have all been cried out but I ache, I ache in ways I didn't know I could and I keep having all these _thoughts _about what they're going to do to me.

It just sounds like rape when it all boils down to it.

I am scared the most of the process itself. When it almost happened – with Raharu – I received her memories extremely strongly like there were two people in my one brain. Will that happen with the monsters that they shove into my head? Will the hands reach in and wrap around my brain and squeeze, so much like a great big fruit, until I can't think straight any more because I've got every past thought of the lives of seven thousand different things from _other fucking planets_?

Will I go crazy? Will I die? Will I ever see Mika again?

I can hear her voice now as it sounded on the phone, as it always sounds, a fusion of her mother and her sister and the deadly harsh seductive nngh purr of cartoon snakes. I can smell her bedroom and see her bedroom and feel her bedroom as it would feel if we were in it together, with the air sparking two parts antagonism and one part eroticism every time we touched or made eye contact or I said something utterly stupid.

And so damnit, I jerk off in one corner and I see stars and cherries when I come and then I curl up in the complete opposite corner to sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

_Where am I?_

I wake up stiff absolutely everywhere and blinking into the fluorescent light radiating down from the ceiling. I smell blood, sweat, semen and floor cleaner.

_Oh. Fuck._

I take a while to get my bearings together. I have to stand up and stretch and blink and _remember_, none of which is done without at least a little pain. Apparently I slept in the handcuffs and also in a fetal position. The whole atmosphere makes me shut my eyes. I can't stand the sight of the white walls of the room. I hate breathing the stale air and tasting disinfectant on my breath. I hate the scrub of my jumpsuit against my sensitized skin.

And damnit you _don't put a runner in a box_.

When I look at the ceiling I think of how I don't know what time it is. When I look at the walls I wonder what the star means. When I look at the floor I realize I really, really have absolutely no chance of escaping, try as hard as I might.

When I look at the door someone knocks on it.

Before I have a chance to respond someone opens it and is bustling inside with an angry look on her face. It's the redhead – Atsuko? – from the day before and she's twirling on her finger the ring with the key to my handcuffs on it. My eyes gravitate toward it immediately and follow it against my will. She laughs and it's without smiling.

"Lucky kid, Taro-kun," she declares. "Looks like they've found somethin' for you already."

I'm frog-marched out of the room in the clothes I slept in, down a hallway I barely even register and into a room filled with beeps and clicks and harsh metal machines. One entire wall is glass or superplastic or something and through it I can see something extraordinarily strange. It's…a…horse? It's sitting propped up on four fingers with its middle finger jutting forward like a head with the horn of a unicorn and it's prancing around the room and occasionally throwing itself against one of the walls in a pretty masochistic manner.

It looks like it's been trapped in a box for a while because it's behaving in ways that had crossed my mind last night.

Atsuko throws me into a chair. "Sit." Because I'm so not sitting already.

"What the hell is going on?" I mutter but there really isn't any benefit in struggling or fighting back or asking questions that won't get answered, is there?

"Good morning, Taro," answers Eyebrow over a PA system that whines with microphone malfunction. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but we captured the perfect specimen to perform this procedure with last night, around one this morning actually. It's approaching critical condition so we had to do it right away. Keep in mind this is strictly for observation purposes so we won't be performing any tests. I hope you'll understand."

_I'm in handcuffs, you asshole, what else can I do?_

Atsuko is snarling but it's almost with glee that she straps the square blue helmet to my head and fidgets with the knobs at my temples until it's _exactly _straddling the line of "irritating" and "downright painful." "This'll only hurt a little," she lies before she backs up against the wall furthest from the chair.

With a touch of a button the superplastic wall slides away and the handicorn launches itself at me and a _ping _shoots straight through both of my ears and it vanishes in a vortex of _fucking pain_.

I have images. A large and hideous raisin-colored triangle has a mother-feeling stapled to it. Things grow out of the ground upright in the shape of fallen-over trees. The sun is purple and I sometimes see the world in negative. I eat chain-link fence.

When my eyes open again it is to see Atsuko with blue-green hair and then slide them shut again as I pass out from the pain.

---

This time when I wake up I know _exactly _where I am.

The good thing is that my handcuffs are off so my wrists and my head are both feeling fine. The bad news is that my stomach is growing mutinous and I can't really see much of anything out of my left eye.

"I think he's recovering quite well," says a muddled voice.

_You call this well? _

"It's probably because his unit is sealing," says another, "or else he'd adapt to it more readily."

"Take what you can get, I guess."

I flop to the left and vomit straight onto the floor and a pair of dark brown boots.

"That's disgusting," comments Kitsurubami.

"Tell me," I say with a sour mouth, "what the fuck you're doing to me."

"Taro, Taro, Taro," says Amarao. "We've already told you that. We're shipping these N.O-spawned monstrosities back to where they belong."

And suddenly I am aware of something. It had never occurred to me, so it _must _not have occurred to them, but with Reiko's voice and the sudden return of my eyesight I yell, "_But you're sending them back to the wrong place!_"

"What's that?"

"What's that?"

I stand up out of the chair and take the helmet off and in a fit of uncharacteristic rage I kick it through the thin filth and across the room. "You think we're so high and mighty as humans to just _kick _these things back out of our world! Did you ever stop to think that we're sending them back to _other _worlds where they're equally unwanted? You claim to be protectors of interdimensional safety and yet you're fucking up the entire cosmic biosystem! That thing you shoved into my brain just went to a place where it'll be even _less _happy than it was here, and it'll cause even more destruction on an unsuspecting, _more defenseless _plane of existence! You can't fucking play god! You can't you can't _you can't!!!_"

The words just pour out of me. I keep screaming and I have no idea where everything I suddenly know comes from. I just know in my soul – no, in my _brain _that I'm right. I don't pay attention to the recognition that's creeping over the faces of the officers in front of me because I'm screaming and screaming and professing the truth until my lungs collapse too hard for me to even care. I'm right. _I'm right_.

When I can't say anything else Amarao opens his mouth to say something instead and out of it comes a claxon roar.

Atsuko, the blue-haired girl and a third girl with a long black braid burst through the door begging orders. "What's the alarm?" In the hallway I can see red lights swirling all over the place and reflecting off the walls and Atsuko's keys.

"Intruder!" Amarao yells and he almost stampedes out the door but returns to grab me around the wrist and drag me with him as an afterthought.

Kitsurubami gets out after us but managed to wriggle out in front as we race down the hallway. I can barely hear her over the blaring alarm sound. "Code Red!" she yells into every door we pass. "Red, red, red, red, candy apple red!" At a four-way intersection we all shoot different ways but I manage to shove Amarao into a wall and _run away_.

I'm good at that.

He chases after me screaming like a siren and I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My sneakers squeak on the too-clean floor and I stumble more than once but I know where the door is because _I know everything. _I make all the right turns except for one.

If I had taken the right turn, I wouldn't have found Tasuku.

He flips around to face me as soon as he senses my presence, brandishing his signature baseball bat _left-handed _to ward me off. I can't make eye contact because he's wearing dark blue sunglasses that obscure his eyes but I can read the recognition on the rest of his face as he immediately lowers the bat and rushes to me to guide me out of the complex. I can't find the words to say to tell him that I know how to get out myself because I know _everything_.

It's narrated to me in my head in his voice even though I've never heard it before.

_The seven-pointed star is a symbol for the S.I.E.T.E. – the Society Intrepid of Extra-Terrestrial Exploration – a North American organization that performs humane N.O research and seeks to find an alternative to the Medical Mechanicca way of negating the threat of N.O related creatures. Amarao's Japanese branch of the S.I.E.T.E. is generally considered to be a renegade operation, possibly garbled by his past relations with one Haruha Raharu, a woman who used to be an extradimensional correspondent for the S.I.E.T.E. before surrendering her heart to the Pirate King Atomsk and his power. Nandaba Tasuku was sent to America under the cover of pursuing his baseball career in order to obtain elite training and specific instructions pertaining to the reformation – or, should that fare poorly, elimination – of Amarao's defective S.I.E.T.E. base. Complications arose when he returned to find that his family and sometime fling had both had direct relations with both Raharu and Amarao, but ultimately it was decided to execute the plan as it was issued. _

"Thanks for busting me out," I say to him breathlessly when we reach the door.

"It wasn't out of my way or anything," he whispers to me in a low suave voice that I really have to learn how to use sometime. "Good luck." He tosses his bat from hand to hand and turns to go back into the fray while I barrel out of the compound on my own two feet and through the streets of Mabase, across a bridge with a cat under it and across train tracks with broken bottles sitting on them and straight to the train station and into the huddled group that is my friends to grab Mika around the waist, wrench her head back by her pretty-girl hair and shove my tongue into her mouth like breaking the tape at the finish line.

We break off breathless to Chisune and Reiko's applause. "If you don't fuck me later," she tells me, "I think I might kill you."

"That's not much of a threat."

"Where's Suzume?" Reiko asks me.

Reluctantly I tear my eyes from Mika and turn to her. "She's with Raharu."


	9. Chapter 9

_It's finally gotten to the part where I feel like I know what I'm doing, _I realize.

Chisune runs beside me and Reiko stole some kid's bike and Mika is clinging to my shoulders for dear life as I run, run like the wind, like a running thing, like _Taro_, through the streets of Mabase that I have somehow memorized because I know _everything_ to the place where Raharu is with Suzume. The closer we get the more I can hear in my head the situation that I know is playing out.

Feet to the sidewalk.

_"It's you," says Suzume._

_"It's me," says Raharu with a grin._

Feet to the gravel of an alley.

"_You're just so – "_

_  
"I know," says Raharu. "I know exactly what you think of me. You know, I've never been with a woman before."_

It's a lie or else how would I have known what Samejima Mamimi tasted like? Feet to the grass of someone's lawn that gets shredded by Reiko's stolen bike wheels, after the rain and all.

_"Just step a little closer, and let me try it out."  
_

Don't do it, Suzume. We've got to fucking hurry or she'll do it, damnit. I can't even spare a glance at Reiko. Feet down the center of two-way traffic with car horns blaring at us. Mika's hot breath in my ear and legs locked around my hips and chest pressed into my spine.

_"I've got a girlfriend."_

_  
"No you don't, sweetie," she says with a horrible turn of her tongue._

It's just over this hill we have to run will Cheeze make it his lungs are giving Reiko can't bike that hard either oh god how fast am I running _are we too late?_

"No!" I scream, but neither of the women turn to look at me before the kiss happens, happens, like it's a verb without a subject or an object, just something that does rather than something that people do. It's not like Mika's kiss; this is the kiss of death.

Literally.

Tasuku's voice is back and I wish I could block it out because it tells me things I don't want to hear.

_Raharu's true form is made of far too much energy for her to exist on our planet without causing serious damage. Fortunately, technology has given her a way to inhabit human forms so that she can be of assistance to our cause. At the time it seemed like a worthy sacrifice. Now that she has defected, becoming one of her host bodies is possibly the worst fate a person could have. She has been cut off from the improvements that her device needed and her host bodies will last for less and less time each time she must take a new one. It seems like she was long overdue. _

Naturally Suzume screams, but it is almost more a scream of anger at being tricked and losing what had seemed like such a quest than in pain. Her eyes roll back in her head and when we can see the irises again they are a sickly golden-yellow like something alcoholic. The tips of her hair fade to pink and then the color sweeps down to her roots in a wave like it's growing the wrong direction. I can't turn away.  
Reiko's hand flies to her mouth as though she is about to cry, something I have never seen her do. Chisune's eyes are bugging out of his head. I feel like I'm going to be sick.

Mika hops off my back, runs to her sister, and smacks her clear across the face.

"Get the fuck out of my sister's body!" she screams, shrill and inconsequential against the force of power that is Raharu.

"This is all that monkeys are good for!" RahaSuzu spits back at her, grinning so wide that her teeth are everywhere which is a face that Suzume never makes. "Don't think I'll hesitate to kill you!"

"You'll have to get through me first," I growl.

"Oh, and what are you going to do about it, you backward freak?" She lifts the guitar from the corpse beside her and shoulders it with an angry twang. "You've been inside my head, damnit! You know what I'm capable of!"

"You'll have to get through _me_ first," says Reiko, and all eyes swivel to her.

"How is that supposed to be any different?" RahaSuzu says but it's a little stammered and a little choked.

"You can't do it, can you?" says Reiko with an equally strangled voice. "I can see it in you. You're still _her_. Come on, Suzume, damnit! Fight her!"

"It's no use!" says Raharu. "She's dead!"

"You're wrong," I say. "It takes longer than this. Your device is old, it's not up to speed – "

"How do you – you horrible pondscum on the surface of sentient existence. People have been telling you things that are beyond your comprehension!"

"Nothing is beyond my comprehensions! I know _everything_!"

Her eyes widen and she finally can't do anything but scream and charge toward me with her blue left-handed Rickenbacker outstretched and ready to do damage. I brace myself for the impact that I know will do nothing.

It doesn't come. I'm waiting for a guitar and what I get is an elbow. Her whole swing was thrown off course by Chisune's shoe connecting with her face. I shoot him a two-second glance and see him smiling before I stop wasting time and grab the sides of RahaSuzu's face, forcing her forehead into contact with mine.

With the guitar in her hand the channel in my head is wide open. Her energy wars with mine in the minute space between us. She won't leave Suzume.

"Help!" I garble out.

Reiko crosses to me first and fastest with her hand to the back of my skull. Chisune is taller and finds the top of my head. Mika is shorter and sends her energy to me with a half-hug from behind and a trace of fingers slipping up into my shirt.

Slowly but surely and with the most cliché union of powers like something out of an anime or whatever, I draw Raharu out of Suzume, in through my reverse N.O, and out of this world.

For good.

---

I find out later how the whole ordeal at Amarao's headquarters went down. The end of Raharu is the end of my bottomless knowledge. Tasuku and his cohorts managed to terminate the poorly run facility. Amarao and Kitsurubami were arrested. Atsuko was dead. Part of me almost liked that.

When I get to tell them about what happened to Raharu they are pleased. Too pleased. I try to remind them that wherever she is she's probably wreaking even more havoc but they're just relieved to pass her off as someone else's problem. I don't know, maybe it really is high time that it was someone else's turn.

Suzume is taken in by the S.I.E.T.E. operatives for remediation and therapy after playing host to Raharu. She's lost a lot of energy and they say some of the synapses in her brain have been disrupted. Reiko, who is obviously very interested in the proceedings of their organization, is allowed to go along. Right now I'm pretty sure she's wrangling for an internship. And they'll take her. She's certainly intrepid enough.

Right before she leaves she asks me to write everything in her book. Everything I knew, everything Tasuku's voice had whispered into my ear/brain. I can't. It's gone. I tell her she'll find it all out for herself but she seems a little disappointed. Frankly I'm just amazed that she's still so fixated on all of this after everything we went through.

I could go forever without seeing any of it again.

So they pay for Chisune and Mika and me to take the train back home. They give us letters for Reiko's dad and Suzume's parents explaining what's going on and that nothing is really wrong. Tasuku assures us that the letters are very convincing and leave no space for doubt. Somehow we don't find that very convincing. After all, who would believe all of _this_?

I suppose maybe even you don't believe all of this. It's a pretty crazy story, isn't it? Maybe I'm a pathetic kid with an overactive imagination who comes to track practice every day but never gets to run because he's awful at it. Maybe Chisune is that kid I always wanted to be friends with but was never good enough for. Maybe Suzume is the girl that used to babysit me and Reiko was her fat, ugly friend that she only hung out with because she pitied her. Maybe Mika was the queen bitch of the school and yeah, I still jacked off to her, but she was totally out of my league.

But maybe I ran in the Olympics one day. Maybe Chisune went cold turkey for a year, only to cave in, buy a pack of cigarettes and a lottery ticket, and win the whole jackpot. Maybe Suzume and Reiko wrote a book together on everything paranormal they had experienced and are growing old together in Mexico. Maybe Mika opened her own fashion line and became incredibly successful because of the cute signature cherry logo. Maybe she and I have sex _every fucking night_.

I guess you'll never know, right? The days of getting inside my head are over, right?

Yeah. And maybe you can tell us what that goddamn pink graffiti said, too.

END

----

AN: So I finally managed to complete a chaptered fanfic. Out of the three I attempted to date, this is the only one I didn't abandon (this is not including This "Love" Business, which I started after N.O Return Address), and I'm pretty proud of it. For anyone who's actually been reading this at all, I thank you and I hope that you enjoyed this story. I'm really fond of the characters – I tried not to make them unbearable OCs – and while I had thought this would be longer, I think it wrapped up as nicely as I could possibly ask for. If you've been reading, please, _please _give me some reviews and let me know what you thought! I'd super-appreciate it. Thanks again.


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